In the 1960s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union,
was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on
expertise rather than on ideological purity. Mao’s own position in
government had weakened after the failure of his “Great Leap Forward”
(1958-60) and the economic crisis that followed. Mao gathered a group of
radicals, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao,
to help him attack current party leadership and reassert his authority.

Mao
launched the so-called Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution) in August 1966, at a meeting of the
Plenum of the Central Committee. He shut down the nation’s schools,
calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders
to task for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary
spirit. In the months that followed, the movement escalated quickly as
the students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards and
attacked and harassed members of China’s elderly and intellectual
population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to
that which existed for Josef Stalin, with different factions of the
movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought.